Orpheo’s UMV Format
May 5th, 2009 by 
Multimedia Mike
I was contacted by someone who is performing an in-depth investigation of the data files for the game Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Tale of Orpheo’s Curse. During the course of said investigation, he happened across my old Multimedia Exploration Journal entry where I briefly inspected a CD-ROM copy that I had procured.
Oddly, my notes concluded that there was nothing interesting on the disc and that the contents would fit on a standard 5.25″ floppy disc. This might be a case where the game was unremarkable, multimedia-wise, for for its original floppy-based release but was upgraded for a subsequent CD-ROM release.
He was able to work out the identities of many of the data files. These include AIFF, MID, and even tracker module formats like 669 (no, Colin, I don’t have that loader finished; to the rest of you… nevermind). He also found what we suspect is a FMV format called UMV and provided 3 samples. I looked at it briefly but nothing jumped out at me, save perhaps for some signed 8-bit PCM audio chunks. This would be unusual since most 8-bit PCM of the time was unsigned.
I know you want to tinker with the samples, so here is the requisite MultimediaWiki page, along with the 3 UMV samples.
No multimedia format is too obscure. That reminds me– I have a multimedia-looking file hanging around on one of my filesystems called CREDITS.NXL. Does that sound familiar? Did anyone reading this send that to me? What game is it from? I suspect I received it from a kind, curious contributor but was too lazy at the time to post details on the wiki.
Posted in Game Hacking | 
7 Comments »
May 8th, 2009 at 4:19 am
this reminds me, i need to locate the ‘Zootopia’ cdrom. my library has never heard of it. :(
more infos:
http://tesl-ej.org/ej13/m4.html
May 8th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Do you know if it has a custom multimedia format? This sounds like it would just use QuickTime.
May 10th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
no idea. i’m actually looking for an animation on the cd :)
May 15th, 2009 at 3:52 am
Well, I messed up the formatting of the UMV wiki page (I think I’ll never be able to make a wiki page look readable).
Anyway, the muxing/audio format seems mostly clear, for the video it would be helpful to know what it looks like. What I have seen looks like it is a 256-color paletted format at a 160×120 resolution, but I can’t know for sure.
May 19th, 2009 at 6:41 am
Mike: Thanks for making this post!
If possible can you ensure that Reimar sees this comment?
Hey Reimar,
I just noticed that you had a look at the format
seriously, many thanks :D
You were requesting to see the video, Ive made a dosbox video of one of the in game videos which uses the dosbox capture format (zmbv codec), and that can be downloaded here
http://robertmegone.com/afraid/afraid_000.avi
the actual video format in question starts at 0:20
if you have any problems with that format then I managed to get the video uploaded to my blog too, but its very small :(
http://sanguinehearts.blogspot.com/2009/05/are-you-afraid-of-dork.html
for convenience I actually uploaded the original umv video file which I believe corresponds to that video, it might help
http://robertmegone.com/afraid/UMV/V_INTRO.UMV
Rob
May 19th, 2009 at 7:06 am
Reimar:
Here is a quick screenshot of the video in action
http://robertmegone.com/afraid/afraid_011.png
bear in mind that the video and screenshot of the video are actually scaled up 2x
so your presumption about 160×120 seems correct
May 20th, 2009 at 5:52 am
I don’t think I’ll do much more work on UMV, I am looking at container formats, re-ing codecs are not that much my area.
I can play the dosbox video though 70 fps causes some vsync issues with a 60 fps screen.